Yearly archives: 2004

Just to be clear, this is very early on in development so don’t expect anything soon.

The ASCII conversion engine is in, but I’ve run some tests and I’m not happy with the output. It’s OK, but when compared to the old version using the same ASCII ramp and settings, the output from the old program is just a little bit better, probably due to how Graphics.DrawImage resizes the picture. If I can’t work out how to improve it I’ll rewrite the old code using unsafe{}, which is something I wanted to avoid.

When that’s done, I’ve got an idea about how to improve the sharpening, which will either work really well or not make much of a difference.

So currently: you can load an image, choose the font, adjust Brightness/Contrast, convert with stretching and sharpening, then save the output as text.

A couple of years after abandoning the ASCII Generator I’m back working on a new image to text converter. The old version still works, but it’s so big, bloated and ugly that I’m no longer able to work on it (and I don’t even have a copy of C++Builder any more). A few months ago I finally was able to retrieve my old jmsoftware.co.uk domain name, and purchased some web space in a really nice deal from Hytek Hosting and moved the old site over.

After abandoning another project I was working on (don’t ask), I decided to go back to my roots and see how feasible it would be to port the ASCGEN over, and the answer was ‘not very’. But… I did run some tests and not only managed to rewrite the conversion engine in C#, but it was faster and smaller.

So, I decided to rewrite the ASCII Generator in Microsoft Visual C#.NET. The main reasons for this are that the development time is fast, and I need to learn it. The main drawback is that you’ll need the .NET Framework installed (one day it’ll come as standard in Windows and this won’t be an issue), but this will be a one time ~20Mb install and then the exe files will be tiny. I’m not going to just replicate the old program (which grew into a really weird text editor), this will be a slimmed down SDI application with just the important features.

This will be a development journal only, so don’t expect any live journal style attention whoring. I’ll get around to fixing the design of this blog soon.

The first version of the program will not be released until it’s ready, and it produces a better output then the old program.